


Burns There Too

by LemonStealingHorse, Whiggity



Category: Over the Garden Wall (Cartoon & Comics)
Genre: Anna is a very open-minded young lady, Beast!Wirt - Freeform, F/M, Sexual Content
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-22
Updated: 2020-01-22
Packaged: 2021-02-27 11:47:36
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,096
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22286620
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LemonStealingHorse/pseuds/LemonStealingHorse, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Whiggity/pseuds/Whiggity
Summary: The book's embossed title glints coyly in the moving arc that he makes to flip back open the page. The bark of his hand leaves just a little black smudge on the paper, charcoal-like, an awkward marker for all future readers to see that the Deathless Wooden God of the Unknown was once here, huddled in the dark, alone and embarrassed and feeling distressingly like ateenager.(For "Prince of the Unknown")
Relationships: Wirt/The Woodsman's Daughter (Over the Garden Wall)
Comments: 12
Kudos: 27





	Burns There Too

**Author's Note:**

  * For [xathira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Cabin](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22132252) by [xathira](https://archiveofourown.org/users/xathira/pseuds/xathira). 



> This story is designed to fit into the timeline and continuity (if not the canon) of the wonderful “Prince of the Unknown” series, so you would benefit from taking the time to read at least Part 15 before partaking in this oneshot. If you can’t bring yourself to do that, then the barest amount of background information you need to know is that Beast!Wirt has wooden hands and glowing eyes, and he has been kipped up in the Woodsman’s Daughter’s goatshed for the last week or so with a bunch of bad romance novels. And the Woodsman’s Daughter is named Anna. ...Read the comics, yo.
> 
> I think I had a half-decent theme in mind when I started writing this but I forgot it and now the only reason for this fic to exist at all is to hopefully make xathira's life a little bit worse. (ﾉ◕‿◕)ﾉ*:･ﾟ✧

By the light of his eyes, the virginal protagonist blushes.

_“William,” whispered the girl, her voice scarcely louder than the gentle insistence of the forge. The farrier braided his fingers delicately with hers, rubbing the silky skin of her knuckle ‘twixt his iron-cast callouses. The youth tried so very hard to be soft for her, and his consideration tasted a thousandfold sweeter than cider or summer breeze or any of the paltry confections from their long afternoon spent at the fairgrounds. How his chest heaved now at her closeness, his shoulders widened! How she would have liked to kiss that chest, embrace those shoulders. But—_

_“Oh, William.” Anna was near to weeping, not from sadness, just emotion unspeakable. “You know I cannot possibly stay a moment longer. My father will wonder and come to see, and even this contact would be too much for his—”_

_“Damn your father,” breathed the chestnut-haired youth, his face mantled most becomingly ‘neath those streaks of smoke, blue eyes dilute from the spirits of his passion. “Damn the horses, damn the forge. Damn livelihood!” And he threw down his tongs before sweeping forward to press his broad body to hers, his hands on her shoulders, his groin at the level of her navel. A desirous shudder wrenched her frame. “I’ve no needs at all anymore, not outside the embrace of your arms, and lips, and sweet slender legs. The only provision my life further requires is_ you, _Miss Sayer, you and the nourishing love that you have stirred in the depths of this coal-black—”_

Something shifts in the substrate near Wirt’s feet, and he slams the book closed with enough speed and ferocity to kill a fly. The bloom of his terrified gaze jumps to the wall, but the only witness to his restless hour is a rheumy-eyed goat, blinking rectangularly in the amber light. Once his heart starts back up, Wirt feels enough nerve to hiss, “You’re supposed to be _asleep.”_

Livestock never offer the Beast the same level of regard that wildlife do. The goat casts him a look which says he should know, and lays its grumpy head back down in the deep bedding hay.

Though he’s pretty certain he’s the only creature in the goatshed still awake, and the only sapient one to begin with, his paranoia has risen like sap in the bough. Holding that damnable book tight to his chest (with one wooden finger inside to bookmark the page, of course), he closes his eyes tight, concealing the telltale light of his wakefulness from any passers-by and extending his agrestal awareness into the bodies of the plants growing for a hundred feet around the shed. He takes in the view from daffodil and dogwood, from pine and primrose and countless other sprouts scattered throughout the woodland clearing, training their perspectives toward the homey cabin in its center. No movement there, just a low light shining in the attic bedroom, some dim oil lamp meant to allow Anna to indulge in the same sort of late-night reading that Wirt has been engrossed in since the sun went down and Greg came to offer him a hug goodnight.

Well. Probably not exactly the same sort of late-night reading.

Satisfied that his wakefulness hasn’t been noticed from the main house, Wirt relaxes. He draws his perception back within the bounds of his body and opens his eyes again, flushing the interior of the goatshed with light as he guiltily pulls the worn and weathered volume from where he’s been holding it like a security blanket. The embossed title _My Heart Burns There Too_ glints coyly in the moving arc that he makes to flip back open the page. The bark of his hand has left just a little black smudge on the paper, charcoal-like, an awkward marker for all future readers to see that the Deathless Wooden God of the Unknown was once here, huddled in the dark, alone and embarrassed and feeling distressingly like a _teenager_.

He’s only reading the book for the compelling character study it offers. The story’s protagonist, Anna—coincidentally named Anna—is the youngest daughter of a rich merchant, a starry-eyed thing, quick and curious and not a little _spunky_ for such an old-fashioned book. She is petite and plump and fair of skin, and she loves horseback riding, archery, and the farrier’s apprentice, all without reservation. That apprentice, William, is an employee of her father's and a churlish, lonesome brooder, or he was that, until he caught Anna’s eye and became the object of her coquettish desire. It’s actually quite an interesting dynamic in a genre which so often makes actors of the men alone, and the women virtuous to the point of frigidity. The interplay between Anna and William, while overwrought, almost mirrors that, and Wirt feels that it will be worth having to suffer through a few racy passages in order to find out where their relationship is headed.

Although the story is turning into something a fair bit racier than most. Anna-the-protagonist had spent not a little time at the story’s beginning gazing into a mirror while reflecting on the fullness of her breasts and hips, and it seems as if those details are finally shaping up to become relevant. Wirt pulls his knees tight to his chest, and his unearthly gaze throws warm gold back across the page just in front of his nose.

_William kissed her deeply, salted by scale and redolent with smoke. Never had she felt such stunning heat as the heat of his lips against hers, the warmth of his heaving chest, the hot pressure of his hand on her breast—for it was, now, laid on her breast, in an act of audacity she could scarcely have dreamt of that first evening she laid eyes on the boy bathing at the lakeside. Surely she could not see him as a mere boy any longer! Anna gasped loudly as he teased out the peaks of her nipples from behind their many protective layers of linen and cotton chemise, his fingers drawn like a master gardener’s to those hidden rose-buds, and coaxing them gently to bloom. William followed the trajectory of her amorous inhalation, from her lips to back along her cheek, down her neck, and finally to the barest exposed edge of her clavicle, onto which he latched like a kitten begging for milk._

Clavicle. _Clavicle._ Wirt has come to grip the book so firmly that his claws are at risk of tearing the brittle brown pages. He is not entirely certain which body part a clavicle is, but he has a few good guesses, and every possibility is exhilarating. He half-consciously ghosts a knuckle down the center seam of his slacks and presses the outline of an awkward erection against his stomach, as if to quell it. As if he doesn’t know that this is the exact wrong way to go about doing that. The rough bark of his hand catches the fabric.

 _Anna possessed no voluntary control over the way that she hitched her knee and slid it, lasciviously, to the outer-side of William’s thigh. The littlest of snarls roughed his throat as he ground against her belly, a burgeoning pressure hardly contained by the clasp of his breeches: that most taboo of extremities, the undeniable proof of his masculine desire._ (Wirt makes another compulsive scan around the shed.) _No longer his hand lingered on her breast, not just; now those long strong digits sought to unclasp the first fastening down the front of her blouse, but he struggled, for his fingers were so large, and those pearl buttons so very small. Animal frustration crossed his expression, dark and deep as the midsummer night._

_A single swipe of his powerful hand and—off the ivory buttons flew! Rolling ‘long the stone floor, scattering themselves like diamonds in the coal bin. Anna felt delirious over the danger he was putting them in, and never so aroused in her life. There could not, now, be any presumption of innocence, and there was nowhere for them to hide should her father or the master farrier round the wide-open door of the forge unannounced. How could she even make it back to the main house in such a state? It no longer mattered. All that mattered anymore was their two bodies, gasping and perspiring and holding tight to one another. Anna laid in repose against the anvil-stand with her creamy breasts exposed to the sultry air, and William’s hand cupped possessively around the swell of her quim._

The goat shifts again in its sleep, and Wirt manages not to throw the book into the wall. Nerve is not the only emotion that has his heart racing anymore, and black oil is not the only thing running through his veins and motivating him to make bad decisions. He exhales carefully and cants his hips a little where he sits. The habit of unbuttoning his trousers to relieve the discomfort of an insistent hard-on is so ingrained that he doesn’t fully realize he’s done it at all until his wooden fingers graze the tender skin, and pain tinges his already-flushed cheeks. He looks down on himself in mortification for a second and then glues his eyes to the page as he takes his cock in hand, as though ignoring his own actions can somehow make them undone in the world.

Of course he’d used to masturbate, back in his old life; it never really tracked with his self-image as an intellectual and man of good taste, but at the end of the day he was a teenage boy, and hormones just couldn’t be helped. Not anymore. Now he is a teenage Beast, more desirous of souls than bodies, and possessing a corrupted body of his own that nobody could be asked to look at without feeling fear and disgust, so there’s no point in fantasizing about that kind of thing anymore.

 _Stupid,_ he thinks as he makes an awkward, rough-handed stroke up and down again. This is so stupid, and so is he.

_The low embers of the forge glowed like the apples in William’s cheeks, like the burn on his broad trade-working shoulders. Anna’s daring tracked with her desire; she chose to tempt the farrier by parting her legs further, and placing her hands ‘round his neck to pull him forward into the embrace of her bosoms, which he took to with a groan of deep satisfaction._

Isn’t satisfaction the only thing anyone really wants? The rub isn’t _too_ uncomfortable if he just uses the crook of his thumb.

_Like a cat in the mint, William pressed his face flat against the globes of her chest and rolled his head to capture the right nipple in his mouth. O, joy! was Anna’s only thought. The whip of his tongue; the pull of his mouth; the continued insistence of his fingers against her slickening kitty, unconfounded by the bulk of her skirts! And the response this touch inspired in her was to grind against his hand, tiny thrusts, tiny circles, much in the way of a man chasing completion. The laugh that rose in her throat was not only from erotic thrill, but ill-mannered humor: as many times as Miss Higginsworth had called her boyish, this surely was not what the governess had meant to imply!_

Yet another movement from the goat, but he ignores it this time. Pain and pleasure are a two-headed dragon; if he takes his eye from the words on the page for even a moment, his focus is killed, and pain is all that’s left. He’s close, but also starting to have difficulty holding the book open one-handed, to say nothing of turning the pages. His shoulder is still only half-healed from the hatchet wound imparted on him a few days before. With a fumble, Wirt switches the novel from left to right, but that means he has to try pleasuring himself now with his _non-dominant_ clawed wooden hand and—

(It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t feel _good,_ not like it’s supposed to. He’s sore and tired and he just wants this to be over and he’s a fool for trying to pretend that he can be a normal person with normal urges when there is _nothing_ in his life, not even something as base and lowly as this, that hasn’t been tainted by his decision to blow out the lantern—)

_But as William swept upward to capture her in a kiss impressed atop the anvil-stand, there sounded the small crash of a horseshoe falling from the lintel, and a cry of dismay._

_“Oh!”_

A footstep falls inside the entrance of the goatshed.

“Oh...”

_And Anna could not twist to look, so she flung her head backward with a gasp, and set her upside-down gaze into the shocked blue eyes of her oldest sister Lydia._

The utterance comes from the doorway. Such an uncanny synchronism of reality and fiction has Wirt looking up from the page slowly, like an actor in a play, involved in the proceedings and yet fundamentally removed. Anna, the real Anna, stands before him wearing her shift, one hand holding a candle and the other clapped over her mouth. She stares at Wirt and Wirt stares back, legs splayed, holding his cock, utterly swayed by the slow lizard quadrant of his brain which believes that the best way to escape danger is to freeze and be inconspicuous. He’s still hard—oh, God, he’s lost an erection for less, how can he still be hard? And she’s still _looking_ at him, speechless, and he can’t bring himself to move or even cloak himself in shadow, and the seconds between them have spanned full epochs by the time that naysaying nanny-goat raises its head from the hay again and lets out a small bawl at Anna, to upbraid her for disturbing its sleep.

The spell is broken. Wirt recoils, and Anna bites her lip and finally blurts out, “I’m sorry, I’m so terribly sorry!” She takes a step backward as if to leave the stall, but freezes again with her eyes on her hand holding the candle. The flame flickers as the night wind breathes, and it is starting to seem to Wirt that this might actually be Hell, and he condemned to a mute eternity of sitting exposed to a girl who has been nothing but decent to him.

But she does speak again. “Do you, um...” Her cheeks turn poppy-red, and it seems an act of incredible willpower for her to meet his eye once more. Her look of trepidation is nearly equal to his own.

“Do you need help?”

#

As the Beast’s eyes widen and his face turns the color of a tulip, there is nothing Anna wants to do so much as take her words back—but failing that, she hopes she can at least _justify_ herself.

“It’s not that I mean to be untoward,” she babbles, taking a step forward without thinking, and then skipping back again when he cranes away from her as if in panic. “It’s just that I, I thought I saw firelight in the shed and had to be sure no one had left a candle, so I didn’t intend to spy, but...” But she had spied, not for any less than ten seconds before he finally noticed her arrival. Shame burns her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, I wasn’t thinking. It’s just that—you’ve wooden hands, is all, a-and given what I’ve heard about, um, men, and their urges, it seemed you might like—”

“Urges?” Wirt faintly asks. It’s the first time he’s spoken, the question given in a tone of absolute disbelief, and Anna can feel her flush spread from her cheeks all the way out to her ears like the heat of a slap. She quickly places the candle on the ledge of the stall, feeling so nervous as to be a little unsteady on her feet.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispers once more, facing toward the slatted wall so that she cannot be drawn to stare at him. He has, perhaps, been shocked into forgetting that he is still quite exposed. “I-I’ve made a fool of myself, I promise we needn’t talk about this—”

So Anna swivels in the hay, fully intending to heed her promise by never thinking about, let alone mentioning, this encounter again, but against every expectation, she hears him weakly insist, “No.” Shock passes across her skin as if she’d walked into a bank of fog. Anna turns again, hesitantly, not all the way, so she can just about see him out of the corner of her eye. She doesn’t know what he might be about to say and he doesn’t look like he does, either.

“I mean,” he stutters after a moment, “y-you’re not a fool.” And it shouldn't have been possible for him to flush any more deeply, but that’s exactly what he does.

Anna finally dares to look at Wirt again, though he doesn’t return the gesture. She makes a quick appraisal—of his manhood, yes, for it’s impossible to fully avoid that latitude of the human form, but the rest of him too, everything that makes him the the not-unhandsome young man he is. Obviously there are the hooves and claws and antlers to account for, but also the kind, concerned brows and the shy gaze and strong nose, and the appealing frame which is trim and square in that way only men’s bodies really can be. He may wind up almost broad, when he’s grown.

She oughtn’t to let her gaze linger, but having emerged again on the far side of her consideration, she dares feel that she may not have been wrong to make the offer she did. Her surety bobs back to the surface of her mind like a cat-tail on a lake.

“I would help,” she whispers. “If you wanted it.”

Wirt doesn’t answer, not with words, but he meets her eyes for a glancing second and prominently swallows. Anna cannot think to interpret his expression through any other lens than that of a desire which he dares not speak aloud, so she does as he will not ask her to, and checks out the door of the shed for further interlopers before taking a step over the goat to scurry by his side. The goat in question is finally fed up with their commotion, and grumbles her way to the next stall over so that Wirt and Anna are left quite alone at the eastern end of the building, cocooned within the contrasting shades of golden candlelight and the Beast’s now-rose-blushed gaze. He shrinks down in his shoulders, and she has to bow a little to avoid the swing of his antler. His body language speaks of a desire to disappear, but Anna knows well that he could do so in an instant if he really wanted to.

Late-spring wind hisses around the slatted walls, and again, the candlelight shivers. Anna exhales a quick, determined little breath and asks, “Would you like me to try?” extending her left hand perhaps an inch in his direction.

He nods dumbly.

All her life, Anna has been—is now, will always be—her mother’s daughter before anything else. While Father stayed indoors with his maps and books and wells of ink, Mother had been the one to take her out into the world and teach her about the cruel and beautiful vagaries of nature, of which sex was just one of many. _“There’s a certain way men and women are,”_ her mother had told her once, not long before she died. _“Rather like the ways animals act in the springtime or—or the thrill that inspires people to write silly stories about romance.”_ That had been the afternoon Anna found a stash of strange-looking novels hidden beneath her parents’ bed. _“It’s just a part of life, and nobody can help that, so nobody ought to be made to feel ashamed of it.”_ As Anna reaches out to carefully grasp the penis of the boy sitting next to her, she understands for the first time both the shame and the thrill that she’d been appraised of on that day so many years ago. In combination, they are as heady as pipesmoke.

Unselfconsciously, Anna rolls her fingers along the warm shaft. She has it on good authority that the male member is not fortified by bone, but its extraordinary firmness could have convinced her otherwise. And what a strange shape, helmed and jacketed like a wartime general! Wirt shudders at her touch as though he’d expected to be struck, and his mouth falls silently open as she draws her hand experimentally upward and then down again, mimicking his technique.

“Hold it higher up,” he croaks breathlessly, followed immediately by, “Sorry, I’m sorry...”

She can only imagine how the poor boy would react if she were to laugh, so she masters that impulse. None of this is even funny, but rather absurd. Anna feels as though she is seeing the whole world clearly for the very first time: How strange, the ways that people, him and her and everybody, can be made to fear the things which bring them pleasure! “Is it supposed to be a bit like milking a cow?” she asks haltingly, but Wirt seems a little petrified and not overly flattered by the question, so she keeps quiet and resolves to figure it out as she goes along. She’s read enough love stories to have a decent idea of what this should entail.

After all this time, he’s still holding the novel open on the ground beneath his hand. _My Heart Burns There Too._ It’s one of the better books; he could have done much worse. Anna reaches to pull the volume free and leans it up against her knees, flipping open to some page toward the back and taking care not to cease her ministrations as she begins reading out loud.

 _“’She could scarcely believe the wetness in—’_ Oh.” No gentle transition back into those bluer passages, then. _“‘...the wetness in the space b-between her legs, as her William bowed her backward across the cot at the rear of the forge._

“‘ _Is it not fair,’ Anna contemplated as the man atop her ran his tongue between the twin peaks of her breasts, ‘that I should find some enjoyment in his body, as he does in mine?’_ _For however urbane she might be in ideals, this was nonetheless her first time experiencing the male form at such proximity. She sought to paint a picture of his torso with her fingers, slipping her hands down the loose collar of his smock and feeling out the churning muscles of his upper back and chest. At a stretch she could just barely graze his n-nipple with her finger, in much the same way he had often done to her. A small moan escaped his mouth as she did, and she was very pleased to imagine what further attention might accomplish there. For another day, perhaps. For next time.’”_

On the one hand, Anna appreciates the book for remembering that men can be as appealing to women as women are to men. On the other, she hadn’t considered how it would feel to narrate such wanton desires as expressed by a girl with her same name. She shrugs off her resurfacing nerves like a cloak.

 _“’At long last William released himself from suckling at her bosoms, but by the look in those sultry blue eyes, she could see that he was far from done with her body. She made to sit up and kiss him; in manful disagreement, he placed one wide hand at the base of her throat to keep her low, and used the other to flip… flip up her skirts. 'William!’ The delight in her tone was stronger than the shock. Without uttering a word to justify himself, he knelt with his fingers wrapped around her snow-white thighs, and—’_ Ahem. _‘...a-and buried his handsome face in the silken bristle between her legs, so that he might drink her arousal.’”_

Anna is absolutely determined not to shy away from the task she’s begun, but she can feel her confidence fading fast. Wirt won’t look at her, and she can’t look at him. She’d forgotten just how ribald this story becomes, toward the end.

_“’The pillow of his tongue kissed the bed of her body. Her William—for he is hers, he always was—her William would never toss her back like a finger of cheap whiskey. He savored her like the finest wine, aged through the heat of summer, long-legged and plush. Pleasure furled through her loins like ink spreading in water, smoke twisting on a breeze, the bliss of scratching skin which has been too long exposed to the hearth—or the forge, where even now she could feel her heart burning with the embers. And at the center of that blooming pleasure—something hard and bright and real, heightening, sharpening!’”_

Wirt breathes incoherently from next to her shoulder, “I can’t, I’m...” but she keeps her rhythm as steady as her weary arm will allow and refuses to look askance.

_“’Oh, William,’ she whispered. Sweat slicked her inner thighs, chafed against the stubble on his jawline. ‘Oh, oh, oh.’ He pressed his tongue inside of her, and in that moment, she knew surely that she was really a burning star, resplendent, heavenly, a being of glorious, sweltering heat, muscular contraction and libidinous haze. And then—!’"_

She’d noticed when his breath began to hitch, but the sudden spill of liquid down her wrist takes her quite off-guard. In surprise, Anna turns just in time to catch sight of the young man at her side bucking, throwing his head back, and covering his face as... well. She presses her lips firmly closed in order not to make a peep, so that he might be allowed to forget she is involved in this moment at all. She’s not sure if she intends that more as a courtesy to him, or to herself. Anna watches enraptured until the flow abates, and his breath deepens and slows and his mouth closes from an expression of ecstasy back to tight embarrassment. Before he uncovers his eyes, she averts her gaze and withdraws her hand.

The pearlish glimmer cupped in her palm is such a curious thing. He bleeds black, but blushes red, and this newest expression is different still. After a moment she becomes aware that he is watching her stare at her fingers, and reaches quickly to clean herself with a handful of hay. And then they just sit, listening to the wind whistle through the walls. Figuring out what to say afterward is the most trying part of the whole endeavor.

“In the morning,” Anna finally blurts, so abruptly that she feels almost as shocked as Wirt looks, “might we have strawberries?”

Before he can respond, the candle stub on the shelf stutters and extinguishes. Darkness does not overtake them completely, but the cast within the shed cools from warm green to blue. His eyes have changed color again. The Beast turns modestly away in order to tidy and button back up, and finally answers her: “Yeah. Strawberries.”

“It's nearly the time of year. Greg mentioned yesterday that he’d enjoy shortcake.”

“I can do strawberries.” He’s no less red now than he was when they started, but for the first time in a long while, he turns up to meet her gaze directly. “I… I mean, um. I just want to say, you know, th-thank you. That was...” He doesn’t finish the thought, but she doesn’t need him to. Quite suddenly, Anna feels completely at ease. Her shoulders relax and she has to look away from him, to conceal a smile which she can’t explain. “I d-don’t... I’m so sorry, you shouldn’t have had to...”

She demurs, “It’s no burden to do a kind thing for a friend.”

“A friend!” That disbelieving echo of the word rips out of his throat like a cough. Wirt pulls his knees close to his chest and sets his clawed hands back through his hair. Again she has to lean to avoid the span of his antlers. “Oh, God, I-I can’t be a friend. Not to you o-or anyone, you have no idea what I...” He bites his lip, and in the bow he makes then, she feels rather struck by the proud outline of his nose. Not-unhandsome, indeed.

“Well,” Anna says measuredly, “I suppose you don’t have to be my friend, but I’ve enjoyed being yours.” His face creases as if in pain. “And as your friend, I’d like for there to be nothing strange between us. You and your brother have been good company to me and I... I wouldn’t want you to feel unwelcome here. So...” With a deep breath, she finally stands up and shakes the hay off of her shift. “Anyway. Yes, strawberries for breakfast would be lovely.”

“Strawberries,” he says faintly.

“Strawberries,” she affirms, and begins to march away perhaps with more theatrical determination than the situation calls for. At the threshold of the building, he stops her one last time.

“Anna?” She looks back on the Beast in her goatshed, the boy who is sharing her home, at least for now. He takes a moment to work his words silently before just whispering, “I’m sorry. I-I'm so sorry.” 

He doesn’t sound to be apologizing for their interlude this time, but she can’t think of any other possible meaning for it. She regards him gently, and answers, “There’s nothing to be sorry for.” And if she feels any sense of lingering disquiet, it dispels in the seconds after she steps back out into the night air.

Her home on the far side of the garden sits stout and warm beneath a crucible moon. Anna shivers her way across the yard with her arms crossed tightly, and only just before reaching the porch does she realize that she has brought the book with her. She pauses to look back on the shed one last time, where that otherworldly blaze still winks between the boards. _My Heart Burns There Too._ Her fingers trace the letters of the title. She ought to leave the novel discreetly by the door.

Or perhaps not. She tucks the volume under her elbow and decides that it’s unlikely to be missed before tomorrow.

She slips back inside, and steals away to her bed for a bit of late-night reading.

**Author's Note:**

> INB4 “You’re going to hell for this."
> 
>   
> 


End file.
